


Atomic Secrets

by marcelo



Category: Atomic Blonde (2017), Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Gen, Not a lot. Sorry., Violence and/as flirting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-06
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-08-19 21:06:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16542248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marcelo/pseuds/marcelo
Summary: No operation ever goes as expected, but no operation ever went so "not as expected" as this one.





	Atomic Secrets

**Author's Note:**

  * For [QueenWithABeeThrone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenWithABeeThrone/gifts).



As you had returned to London without the Alexandria Device, the main question in everybody's mind is who's going to take the fall, or rather if you'll figure out a way to pin it on somebody else. That's most of the intelligence business anyway. But it's not their style to ask directly and risk a direct answer — not that you aren't in the habit of giving them anyway — so their first question in your debriefing is about the woman who jumped to her death in the dark waters of the Vistula, taking with her the secret of the supposed "magical H-plus bomb" the Nazis had found in a sandy Iranian wasteland, luckily slightly too late for that war.

"I didn't learn her name," you begin, "or who she was working for. I'm sure she wasn't local." Most of what you will say after this will be either a lie or staggeringly, deliberately incomplete, and you wish your report had more voluntary gaps and less of the other kind.

Your local contact in Warsaw was rubbish, you say without rancor. That's neither a lie nor unusual. The papers he had given you were so bad they had to be either a deliberate trap or incompetence amounting to the same thing, so you arranged with him a second meeting and followed the disappointed (and insultingly but conveniently small) ambush team back to a closed museum's unsubtly garrisoned third floor. 

You explain it was a standard break-in, not mentioning the operational details they don't care about — a front door nobody had bothered to guard, easily picked locks that looked older than the few artifacts on display, incapacitated guards trained in little more than arrogance — nor the fact that you had found the doors already opened and the guards unconscious and stashed away. You don't mention the rifles snapped like twigs, either, although that had quickly risen to the top of your list of concerns. So much that you grabbed a gun from one of the guards. It was against your habit, but habit got you killed.

You light another cigarette (your knuckles are taking longer to heal each time, something else not to think about for as long as possible, although the rest of your body is unusually and almost unsettlingly pain-free, or at least free of new pains) and say, with absolute honesty and to the limits of your well-honed capacity for understatement, "I did not have sufficient information going in."

And there she was. She was wearing nondescript dark clothes and a plain mask, and was inclined slightly over a desk (without, of course, giving her back to the door or in front of the single window) in what you would later describe to yourself, reusing the words a former lover-slash-target had used in a fit of post-coital poetry, fluid stillness. She was, in short, bloody beautiful. But you keep to yourself most of that.

You do mention that she was going through the Codex' index, which meant she could likely read whatever language it was written on; your very limited briefing had claimed none of Himmler's people had managed to even identify it. One of the men debriefing you rolls his eyes at the idea. Having heard his famously atrocious Russian, you tell him that, of course, you could be wrong. In Russian. He tells you curtly that the debrief is to be conducted in English, so you smile and continue.

"Hi," you said, pointing your gun at her. The men debriefing you ask why you didn't just shoot her. "I didn't want to risk the noise," you lie.

"You're American," she had noted, with a beautiful, steady voice, in an accent that was both perfect and unplaceable, "but that's a very good British accent." This part you also keep to yourself. You describe how she kept looking through the Codex without a glance to your gun, or even the deliberate absence of one. It's important to convey that she was very well trained, although you doubt they would understand exactly how much. You worry you don't either, a thought that makes you feel young and perhaps out of your depth in a way you haven't felt or been in a very long time. Other things too. Some of them are about your unending drive to catch up, the pure instinct of emulation and survival. Some.

"I'm looking for some light reading. Any suggestions?" you said. Not your best line in any of your multiple lives, but you could tell she smiled under the mask. When she looked at you it didn't feel like the prelude of a fight. Dangerous, though. You couldn't, and didn't try to, avoid smiling back.

"The are many books I'd enjoy sharing with a fellow warrior," she said, in a way that at the moment felt absolutely natural, while searching for a specific page in the Codex and ripping and pocketing it, "but not this one."

Then you fought, and she went through the window, and three stories below the nearly frozen Vistula was flowing, and you knew for sure that nobody would find her body. All of that is true. So Himmler's hopefully mythical Alexandrian Device will remain so, and the Cold War will go on with nothing more dangerous than H-bombs. 

All of that is also true. Every one of the many men who believe themselves your boss will be content if not happy with the result.

You tell nobody the details of the fight, such as it was: how she moved from the table to your side almost faster than you could see, the careful precision with which she crumpled your gun like cardboard without damaging your hand, the way your knuckles almost broke against her throat. How her raised palm was anything but dismissive, and the only thing that could and did make you stop fighting at once.

The way you believed her when she told you she was no part of the war, but that preventing the device from being used was her people's responsibility. The way she said it let you know she wasn't doing her country's duty because she was following orders, but because of her sense of her own.

Among your remaining lies of omission in the briefing: That you left the museum not through the way you had entered, but down a rope ladder she had told you where to find. That she lifted her mask, far too briefly, before jumping through the window. The fact that you recognized her lipstick's brand from the way it tasted. It's only sold in one country.

But you will ask for some long-delayed time off to spend in Rome visiting the museums, and that won't be a lie.


End file.
